The combat in Blade and Soul makes me feel attracted

I'm a die-hard fan of Blade & Soul. I've kicked demons in Diablo III, clobbered hydras in Final Fantasy XIV, and unleashed swarms of punches while swigging brews in World of Warcraft. But it wasn't until Blade & Soul that I understood the essence of kung fu--at least as far as a keyboard can master. At its best, Blade & Soul delivers that rare brand of combat that makes me consider learning these moves like real-life experience. And that's why I'm so sorry that the rest never reaches the same heights.

The joy of MMOs is that their developers can add content at their leisure, and NCSoft has an impressively voluminous plan to add dungeons and features, and extend the storyline, as Blade & Soul beds down in the UK. Initially, Blade & Soul’s game-world will be somewhat cut-down in comparison with what is available in South Korea and China, but we’ll soon catch up over here (and in the US, where the game is also launching).

What really keeps my and others interested in the game is the combat. As with Tera Online there is a real feeling of weight to enemies and once you’ve perfected your combos you start to feel a real sense of accomplishment and that you’re growing with your character. I’ve tried a few of the classes out and they all feel quite unique with their different abilities. Talent trees are highly customize or can be automatically filled out by the system by simply choosing a choice of how you are going to play the game, so a standard PVP, PVE or dungeon build.

The interface used for leveling up your players abilities is quite nice, it break down each of the leveling up abilities into sub groups, included a separate skill tree for each type of attack, this offers a cleaner type of leveling up then seen in most other games on the market, however it does mean a lot more clicking to as you need to go into each group one by one to level up anything but you can change the view to a big tree mode.

On the note of leveling up I also did like when you logged of the game it showed you what you have gained during that session, the amount of experience points, money and items, it felt like a well done pat on the back to you menu before you logged off the game.

Blade and Soul is one of the best value Free-To-Play MMOs on the market today. The micro transactions are never forced upon and only consist of aesthetics or premium account bonuses. What makes the game stand out however is definitely the art style coupled with the unique combat styles of each character, making any and all battles alone and with a team insane to be a part of with combos being a huge bonus.

PvP is also really fun and engaging with fighting game style anticipation and engagement. It is just a shame to see that the crafting system is made inferior due to the choice of having world based resources. If you can put that part of the game to one side however, the rest of the experience is top notch and easily deserves your play time.